AI Writes Me Fan Mail (It’s a Scam, But I’m Enjoying It Anyway)

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Maya Bairey

Maya Bairey writes books about real people who feel really stuck. Her characters find solutions inside themselves, but are helped by their relationships, both platonic and steamy. Read her new romance novel for 2024, Painting Celia.

Latest posts by Maya Bairey (see all)

• Under the Wolf Moon: Here I Am - January 4, 2026
• Not Every Miscommunication Trope Is a Plot Device - December 22, 2025
• AI Writes Me Fan Mail (It’s a Scam, But I’m Enjoying It Anyway) - December 11, 2025

There’s a specific kind of thrill that comes from seeing an email in your inbox from someone who claims to have read your book. My heart just jumps! Someone read Painting Celia and loved it enough to write to me about it!

Inevitably these days, the email then mentions a book club with 2,000 members or an impressive social following, and I know I’m looking again at the AI book marketing scam every author’s been talking about. Robots scrape your Amazon page and write you fan mail designed to separate you from your money. But you know what? Before I hit the spam button, I like to sit and enjoy the praise for a minute.

How the Scam Works

Scammers use AI to scrape anything they can find about any book sold online. They feed all of that into ChatGPT or something similar, and it generates hyper-personalized emails that quote specific details about characters, themes, and plot. The emails feel eerily real because they’re built from actual information about the work.

The praise is always over the top. My book “resonates deeply” with their community. It brings together “wounded souls” and “emotional healing” in ways that are “compelling” and “beautifully done.” They’ve discovered me, and they want to help. They run a book club. They have followers on Goodreads. They know how to reach readers who will love my work.

Then comes the ask. There’s a fee (or tip!) to feature the book, from a mere $95 up to many hundreds of dollars. If one hesitates, they’ll offer a discount. Pay up, and nothing materializes. Or worse, they ask for an Amazon password to “optimize” the author page and then lock you out of your royalties forever.

This scam exploded in September 2025. Authors report getting dozens or hundreds of these emails. For the full breakdown of how it works and what to watch for, Writer Beware has an excellent breakdown.

Now that you know, let’s get to why I’m really writing this.

The Fan Mails from The Robots

I received just this week eight different versions of this email about Painting Celia. They all followed the same pattern: effusive praise and weirdly specific details wrapped in vague promises. I want to share them with you, because honestly? They’re kind of cuckoo amazing.

“The quiet hunger for transformation”

One email described my book as “a world shaped by longing, vulnerability, and the quiet hunger for transformation.” Who talks like this? This is the kind of phrase that sounds profound until you think about it for more than three seconds. What does a loud hunger for transformation sound like? Is there a medium hunger for transformation? I genuinely want to know.

“The midnight lessons”

“The growing intimacy, the midnight lessons, and the way their fears slowly surface make the story tender, sensual, and easy to visualize.” Some review somewhere mentions midnight painting lessons between León and Celia. In the book, there’s no such thing. Lessons are always around noon for a plot reason. However, AI can’t help latching onto the cool-sounding and very specific phrase. Tell me you never read my book without telling me!

“The pool house deal”

One email praised how my novel handles “the pool house deal, with its blurred lines between muse and mentor.” I had to read this twice. The pool house deal. Like it’s a real estate transaction where Celia and León are negotiating square footage and closing costs instead of navigating attraction and art lessons and the terror of trusting someone new. I’m calling it the pool house deal from now on.

“What life once tried to break”

“Painting Celia offers a powerful reminder that love and creativity can rebuild what life once tried to break.” This is gorgeous nonsense. It sounds like the back cover copy for a book I might read, except it’s so vague it could describe literally any story where a character has experienced hardship. Which is, you know, all stories.

“Sensual vulnerability”

And then there’s this gem: “Your book, Painting Celia, immediately stood out for the way it blends emotional wounds, artistic expression, and sensual vulnerability.” Sensual vulnerability. I’m going to put this on a t-shirt. I’m going to use it as my author bio. “Maya Bairey writes books about sensual vulnerability.” It means everything and nothing at the same time, which is exactly how AI likes it.

Are the Robots Wrong, Though?

Here’s the thing. Even knowing these emails are fake, the praise still feels good. I read them and think, “well, this AI has excellent taste.”

We’re all vulnerable to this, I think. Who doesn’t want to hear that their work resonates and reaches people? The difference is that real reader connection is messy and surprising. Real readers say things like “I stayed up until 2am to finish this” or “I ugly-cried on the train.” Sometimes they tell you it reminded them of an ex in the worst possible way. They remember details you forgot you wrote while they miss plot points you could not have spelled out more clearly.

AI praise is smooth and perfectly calibrated. It says “compelling” and “beautifully done” and “powerful reminder” without ever committing to what, specifically, compelled it or reminded it of anything. It’s flattery without friction. But I’ll be honest: I’ll take my compliments where I can get them, even if they come from a chatbot trained on a million Amazon product pages.

The emails are all reported as spam, of course. But I do sometimes screenshot a particularly effusive mess that makes me feel brilliant.

Want to Read the Book the Robots Are Raving About?

If you’re curious about Celia, León, the pool house deal, and all that sensual vulnerability, Painting Celia is available on Amazon, Audible, and Lingua Ink. No scam, just the normal price of a book you will hopefully enjoy on a human level.